Nutrition in schools

Fighting the flab

The struggle to feed more children, more healthily

ALBERT and Derick, sixth-graders, happily scoffed their salads during a recent Harlem lunchtime. Ignoring the fork, Albert used his fingers to eat green pepper wedges. Derick didn't much like his veggie burger—“too much ketchup”, which he carefully wiped off with a napkin. He then swigged a tiny carton of low-fat milk. Chanel, though, turned up her nose at the healthy lunch, preferring instead to eat the lunch she brought to school in a bag, a packet of crisps and some biscuits.

Feeding schoolchildren is big business; the federally funded National School Lunch Programme provides free or reduced-cost lunches to 30m children across America each day. But the recession means that a growing number of children are eligible for subsidised meals; and healthy food, alas, can cost more than the salt-, fat- and sugar-laden variety.

So in March the Senate Agriculture Committee unveiled the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, a bipartisan-backed bill that provides $4.5 billion for children's nutrition, including more money for school lunches, over the next ten years. This legislation will allow more poor children to enrol in the lunch programme and will make the lunches healthier—less pizza and more salads. The new bill, it is hoped, will help meet Barack Obama's pledge to end childhood hunger by 2015.

This $4.5 billion, though the largest investment in federal child nutrition ever, falls short of Mr Obama's proposal to spend $10 billion over ten years. The bill allows for an increase of only six cents per meal; not enough, according to Kirsten Gillibrand, New York's junior senator. She wants a 70-cent increase and $4 billion each year. The funding is badly needed. One in three American children is overweight or obese. Obesity is even affecting national security: a recent report estimates that 27% of Americans of recruitment age are “too fat to fight”. The new bill would mean more fresh fruit and vegetable purchases, a boost for Michelle Obama's “Let's Move” campaign against obesity.

The White House is determined to wipe out childhood obesity within a generation, and Mr Obama set up his own task-force as part of “Let's Move”. It released a 124-page report on May 11th with 70 recommendations, including better federal nutrition standards and more funding for school meals. Its battle against fat begins before birth: it advises women to watch their weight during pregnancy and encourages them to breastfeed.

The task-force is calling on the private sector to do its part too. On May 17th Mrs Obama announced that the members of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation—food firms including Kellogg's, Mars and PepsiCo—have pledged to cut 1.5 trillion calories from their products by the end of 2015. It will be an uphill struggle. During lunchtime at one Harlem school's cafeteria The Economist spotted a fizzy drink being passed around a table—covered in brown paper so the teachers wouldn't see.